Stop playing against the buyers of players

The decision taken by 10 Auckland, New Zealand, principals to stop playing against a school that has been aggressively recruiting established 1^st team rugby players, as reported in the New Zealand Herald

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?objectid=12171645&ref=twitter

has caused a bit of a flutter.

It’s not an original story, of course, and the movement of high performing players from schools that already have established rugby programmes to others has become quite common in our schools rugby. I’ve stated my view – it shouldn’t happen and it has to stop.

A respected headmaster of a Joburg boys school, apparently, recently pointed out to a conference of his peers that they have the power to end the practice, and it’s quite simple – stop playing schools who indulge in those practices. If the heads agree to that (and they already have in terms of the charters and agreements they have signed – not to mention by virtue of their non-negotionable duty to be educational in all they do), then there wouldn’t be a problem.

But there is, and at the end of the day we have to accept that either some headmasters are dishonest, or they have lost control of what’s happening in their recruitment departments.

An Auckland-style shunning of those who break the rules would work, although it will punish the players at the banned school who had nothing to do with it. No, we have to get everyone to stop doing it – simple as that.

I made the mistake of taking to Twitter to defend my stand on the matter and came up against all the usual excuses and justifications.

No-one is saying that providing better opportunities to kids who have potential is a bad thing. On the contrary, the success stories of those who have had their lives turned around through bursaries should be sung from the hilltops. I do some work at two Joburg schools who have foundations doing just that and have come across magnificent examples aplenty.

But that’s not what we are talking about, although those who condone the practice of elite recruitment often try to disguise it as some sort of altruistic opportunity creation. Yeah right! They are after more wins for the first team at the end of the year, nothing else, and they should try and pull the wool over other people’s eyes.

As someone in that Twitter thread I’ve spoken of pointed out, there are cases where players who are already on bursaries at good rugby schools are lured to others. There is only one way to do that: offer a better financial deal. That’s buying, not bursary granting.

I’ll give you two examples, and let’s stop stuffing around and name some names. There was an under-14 player, a black boy on a full bursary, living in a top class hostel at a school that produces multiple provincial players who didn’t come back after playing in the Glenwood under-14 Festival at the beginning of the year.

Then there was the Golden Lions Craven Week player, also on a bursary, who suddenly upped and left for Paarl Boys’ High – he didn’t move out of financial need or the desire to be at a school where he would be recognised – he already had been.

There are examples aplenty of that sort of thing and not a single one can be justified. And please stop telling us that the parents approached you. The only cases where that happens are when they have already committed to commoditising their sons and are looking for a deal (as is pointed out in the NZ Herald article) and I’ve been told of a number of examples where that has happened here too.

Our top rugby schools have excellent coaches and the players work incredibly hard, I’ve seen that up close and first hand. Of course you deserve success if you are prepared to do that, and you can’t expect success if you don’t. But if we are to be ethical and educational – and that’s not an optional extra, school sport has to be just that -  then we should work hard at developing the children who are placed in our care.

We certainly can’t go shopping about for replacements and reinforcements to ensure our place on the top of the pile. If you do that you have no right to crow, and those who try to justify what you do in terms of transformation, rugby excellence and professional career pathways are as unethical and uneducational as you are.

And everyone should agree to never play against you again.

Looking back on the best of 2018

And that’s the school sport year done – except for the boat race, and the interprovincials coming up.

So, not for any good reason, except that I always do, I’ve drawn up a list of my top 10 sporting achievements this year. I used to limit them to things I had actually seen myself but now that I work for a rugby and cricket only website, I don’t get around so much. Some of the below are therefore based on hearsay, but they are all undoubtedly amazing.

In no particular order:

1 Lythe Pillay of King Edward VII broke the boys schools athletics interhigh 100m 200m and 400m records, all of the same day and at the end of the year added the SA under-15 400m record to his tally.

2 Jeppe High School for Boys' 1^st hockey team finished unbeaten in a season which saw them play all of the top schools in the country. They successfully defended the local Aitken Cup title for the third year in a row and were the top ranked school in the land on all those odious ranking lists.

3 For the second year in a row, a local player captained the SA Schools rugby team. Last year it was Travis Gordon of KES, this year Jeppe’s Muzi Manyike led the team in their game against France when the original captain withdrew due to injury. Muzi also played for the SA under-18 Sevens team.

4 Two hardy perennials – St Benedict’s won the team competition at the SA Rowing championships for the 25th year in a row, and ...

5 Northcliff High School won the Co-Ed schools athletics A league for the 22^nd year in a row. Heaven knows who will topple them, and Bennies, from their perches. I do know that those wins don’t come easy, though, and in both cases single-minded determination and much hard work goes into it, year after year.

6 One I was at: St Andrew’s School of Bloemfontein won the Coca-Cola Schools T20 Challenge title in Pretoria in March. They are a small school, punching way above their weight. First they ended Grey College’s long domination of Free State schools cricket, then they beat the best from around the country.

7 Everyone’s trying, but no-one has been able to shift Monument from their spot as the top local rugby team. They were beaten by Helpmekaar and Garsfontein earlier but when it counted – in the Virseker Cup final – they produced the goods to beat Helpmekaar 57-11 and take the North Vaal title (and its predecessors) for the eight time.

8 Central Gauteng (OJ Eagles, in effect) won water polo’s national championship (Currie Cup) for the 14^th time in the last 16 years. The club, made up of mainly, but not only, St John’s old boys, is coached by Vlado Trninic and they continued their incredible run of successes.

9 That Currie Cup water polo tournament was held at St Stithians after CGA had to step in, very late, to host it after Western Province withdrew due to the Cape Town drought. Saints parent and Gauteng Schools administrator, Bruno Fernandes, showed he is without peer as a tournament director by putting on another flawless show.

10 The Craven Week was in Paarl and Western Province won the “finals”of both the main tournament and the Academy Week that goes with it. The strength of schools rugby is very much in the Cape and only the Golden Lions seem to be capable of challenging that.

Here’s an 11^th – OK I lied, but this is just so nice.

11 Muzi Manyike, again. The Jeppe head boy and captain fetched, on his own initiative, this little disabled boy from a local orphanage and got him to carry the match ball out, to the cheers of the biggest school rugby crowd of the year, ahead of the second Jeppe v KES derby game.

It just won't be the same down at the pool again

Now's the time to bring out my bounce shot, I thought. It was in a big game for the Johannesburg Otters third team against Zoo Lake.

So I let loose. The ball plugged in the water, if that's possible, and drifted into the back of the head of a team mate who was was ponderously making his way, head down, into the hole. "Wait until I'm ready before you pass," he screamed at me.

The man on the break was Webby, the legendary Brian Webster in his later playing days and 40 years of service to the game of water polo and influence rubbed off onto thousands of youngsters lay ahead.

He was teaching at St David's at the time and I was running Transvaal Schools water polo. We got him on board as a coach, it must have been in the early 80s, and nothing was the same again. A razor sharp wit, an unbelievably sarcastic tongue and a complete inability to suffer fools gladly are what I remember, and what I continued to come across, as I drifted in and out of his considerable presence down the years.

He taught at King Edward School for a number of years and in that time they became the top polo school in the land - there's always heaps of talent among those boys, and his rough and ready style suited the sort of culture you get in that type of boys schools.

From there he went to St Stithians where he was as successful, in a different setting. He re-invented himself as a girls water polo coach at some stage and was instrumental in the development of the game into the fastest growing girls sport in schools in the country.

He eventually stepped down from senior coaching and took junior teams at Saints that hardly ever lost. He remained in charge there, though, and together with his wife Bridget, he invented and initially ran the Saints Invitational tournament that others are getting the credit for these days.

At the same time, he stayed involved at a provincial schools level. He ran Gauteng schools polo and expertly organised the SA Schools Championships when asked to. He also ran the club based at Saints and in the holidays he ran coaching clinics and took teams on overseas tours.

Yesterday I saw a Facebook post announcing that it was his last day in Gauteng polo - at a club game, I guess. Bridget is going to teach at a prestigious girls school in Grahamstown and Webby is tagging along. "I'm going to run the tuckshop, and probably coach some polo," he told me.

I bet he will be. But more than that, Grahamstown is going to get the Webby treatment. It will never be the same again, poolside, for them.

Brian Webster was a constant, sometimes disruptive, presence wherever water polo was being played in this town for so many years. The kids will be poorer for his leaving. I will miss him.

Expanding school feeder zones is putting a band aid on a bullet wound

The state of our educational system is the greatest obstacle in the way of a prosperous, equitable future for all South Africans.

The ratio 5000:25000 is one frequently quoted. There are 25 000 schools in South Africa and research has shown that only 5 000 of them are functional. Of those about 1 000 produce 95% plus pass rates and enrich their learners by way of extra-curricular activities, including community service, sport and cultural activities.

There a variety of reasons for this situation and the main one is that decades of apartheid education intentionally saw to it that the majority of our schools should be inferior. One of the tools used was to create a funding chasm between the schools in the townships and those in the white suburbs – an apartheid educational geography. The legacy of that planning still persists.

The 1000-odd functioning schools are found mainly in the former white suburban areas and most, though not all, of the dysfunctional ones are in the locations.

No child should be condemned to an inferior education because of where they were born and where they live, Gauteng MEC for education Panyaza Lesufi has said more than once, and he is absolutely right.

He has also said that apartheid was man-made and non-racialism should be man-made, and that the poor deserve good education so they can get out of poverty. We need to have one education system. Spot on, again. But what is he going to do about it? And what has the government done about it in the 25 years that it has had control of the national purse, and the ability to make laws?

Remember too that corporate South Africa has long realised the need to fix education and has thrown billions at the problem. Corporate social investment spending in South Africa totalled R6.8 billion in 2016, of which some 48% was channelled into educational projects. That’s more than R2.3 billion, in one year alone.

There is more money spent on education that on just about any other single issue, yet we find ourselves worse off that ever before. And if you are wondering how bad it really is consider that at a significant number of those 20 000 dysfunctional schools teenage pregnancy is a major issue, learners go hungry on a daily basis (and in some the provincial feeding schemes are being looted); there are 0% matric pass rates in quite a few; children are regularly drowning in pit latrines in others; and the senior girls in some of the high schools are systematically being sexually abused by the teachers and even the principals.

There should be a state-led project, bigger than anything we have seen in the last 25 years and designed by people far smarter than me, to fix this, once and for all.

What has the actual response been? Apart from inserting himself into the limelight at schools where issues arise from time to time, Lesufi hasn’t really done much that is easily seen.

He has been on about the apartheid spatial planning issue for a while. The introduction of the online registration system was, at heart, intended to force functioning schools to take in learners who live in areas where the local schools have collapsed. In line with that, the Gauteng Education Department last week decreed that school feeder zones will be expanded to a 30km radius instead of the previous 5km.

The move will prevent schools from turning down applicants who live far away, and to the extent that some schools are doing that to deliberately exclude learners who they see as undesirable, it’s a good thing. Not that all school do that. For many of them, changes in suburban demographics have forced them to trawl for learners from further afield for a long time now anyway. In cases where schools have enough children in their immediate surroundings to fill their classrooms, the implication that some of them will have to travel to a school further away to make room for other applicants who live up to 30km away just doesn’t make practical sense.

It’s a band aid exercise. Let’s force the functional schools to take in the learners from the areas where the schools don’t work and we won’t have to work out how we are going to fix those dysfunctional ones.

The 1000 functioning schools will become overcrowded, and some of them will drop off that list and the 20 000 dysfunctional ones will remain the same, or deteriorate further.

Simplistic solutions are not helpful, I know, but there are well-paid, elected people who should be working on the complex ones. When they come up with ones that do work they should be more about raising the failing schools up than about dragging the working ones down.

Changing feeder zones will get a lot of approval but it will not make a sustainable difference. The one educational system that Panyanza Lesufi is calling for will never exist until they get those 20 000 dysfunctional schools working.